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“What can you tell me about them?”
“I don’t remember.” Casey drew a hand through her hair. “But I’ll call my mother and find out. Falling out or not, she keeps tabs on everyone.”
She reached for her phone and punched in her mother’s number.
Five minutes later, she disconnected the call. Her hands were shaking. “My cousins are in college, like I thought. They’re both girls, and both redheads. Maggie is twenty and goes to Williams. Trish is twenty-one and goes to Princeton.”
“Let’s run with that.” Hutch snatched up his own cell phone. “You track down one. I’ll track down the other.”
It didn’t take long to discover that Maggie had spent the night out with a bunch of her friends—and that Trish was nowhere to be found. Not a single one of her friends had seen her since she left for the library early that evening.
Hutch called the Princeton police department so they could begin a localized investigation and search.
But both he and Casey knew that wasn’t where the body would be.
Even before making the painful call to her uncle and aunt, Casey called Marc.
“Yeah, Casey,” he answered, instantly alert.
“I got a call from the killer.” She went straight to the point. “He said there’d been a new victim and that she was a member of my family. Hutch and I made some calls. My twenty-one-year-old cousin Trish is missing. She’s a student at Princeton. No one’s seen her in hours.”
“I’ll get a hold of the guys I know in the Sixty-second.” Marc referred to the police precinct that serviced the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. “They’ll
contact the other precincts already involved in this case. Hutch will call in the Bureau’s New York field office. The more law enforcement we have out there searching, the better.” The muffled sounds in the background told Casey that Marc was getting dressed. “We don’t need to guess. The body’s somewhere in Bensonhurst.”
* * *
Trish’s lifeless body was found stuffed behind a trash can between two apartment buildings on 79th Street.
Casey and Hutch were already in Bensonhurst, working with the FBI, when the call came in. Casey took off by foot, racing to the crime scene before anyone could stop her. She pushed her way through the crowd until she reached the spot where the medical examiner was squatting down, examining the body.
“Oh, no,” Casey whispered, staring at her cousin. Even if she hadn’t pulled Trish’s Facebook photo, she’d know her. The family resemblance was undeniable.
Trish was crammed inside a canvas tarp, her head drooping awkwardly to one side, a chunk of her hair cut away. Stripped naked, her body was battered from what had obviously been a brutal rape. Her throat had heavy bruises on it—the signs of a vicious strangulation. Some of those bruises were hidden beneath the red ribbon that was neatly tied around her neck. In the center of the bow, two locks of hair had been tucked, side by side, at the base of her throat. And lipstick had been carefully applied to her mouth.
This time, Casey couldn’t control herself. She turned and leaned over the garbage pail, heaving until there was nothing left inside her. Shoulders still bent, she dragged air into her lungs, tears pouring down her cheeks.
Hutch came up behind her, gently rubbing her back in an effort to soothe her. There was no point in telling her it was all right when it clearly wasn’t. Casey’s cousin—a vibrant young woman with her whole life ahead of her—had been horribly violated and murdered. There were no words to make that reality go away.
“There was more than one assailant,” the M.E. announced, studying the strangulation welts. “They used gloves, but there are two sets of different size finger and hand marks on the body.”
“Glen Fisher.” Casey heaved again. “He did this to Trish, together with the other offender. They both... Oh, God.” She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering uncontrollably.
“Also, these two hair samples didn’t come from the same body,” the M.E. continued. “That’s visible even to the human eye. But we’ll have them analyzed for DNA evidence.”
“If the killer is following his usual pattern, one lock of hair belongs to our previous victim, Deirdre Grimes,” Hutch said. “I don’t know about the other.”
“Well, it isn’t the victim’s,” the M.E. told them. “The shade of red is different.”
The shade. Something about that was bothering Casey. She forced herself to turn around and stare directly at her cousin.
“Her lip gloss,” Casey said, her voice hoarse and unsteady. “It looks exactly like the shade I wear. Can you have it checked?”
“Of course.” The M.E. rose to her feet. “Do you have a sample of yours with you?”
“Yes.” Casey dug through her purse, and came up with a tube of pale peach lip gloss. “Here. Check it against Trish’s. Then compare it to the lipstick on all the bodies. If it’s a consistent match, this whole lipstick thing is more than just an arbitrary fetish.”
“It’s yet another link to you,” Hutch said. He studied Casey’s expression, and recognized that she was a nanosecond away from melting down. “Let’s go home.” He pulled her jacket more closely around her. “There’s nothing more we can do here.”
